Weekend Report: Things Are Looking Up

So much for my thoughts on having a $200 million weekend. It was the fourth biggest weekend of the year, but it fell $10 million short of last week, with $166 million overall.

Up easily made it to first place by about $44 million. Pixar’s tenth movie pulled in $68,108,790, about $7 million more than my prediction. Up also set the new standard for 3D openings, with just over $35 million coming from the extra-dimensional showings. It followed the recent weekly record-breaking trend and took the biggest 3D opening crown from 10-week old Monsters vs Aliens. I’m not exactly a slavish fan of everything Pixar does, but it’s heartwarming to see that the they’ve become so successful without always packing their movies full of quasi-celebrities and pop culture crap.

Even though Drag Me to Hell promised R-rated thrills to a PG-13 audience and had no competition in the horror genre, it only managed $15,825,480, well below my $23 million guess. It had extremely favorable reviews, an unmolested target audience, and a director whose last three movies have totaled nearly 2.5 billion worldwide, but for some reason it just couldn’t find much of an audience. It did okay, averaging $6,310 per theater, but it should have done better. Accounting for inflation, Drag Me to Hell didn’t even out-gross Raimi’s last pre-Spider-Man wide release, For Love of the Game, and barely made more than the 19-year old Darkman, which was in 800 fewer theaters.

Star Trek was the only previously released wide release to fall less than 45% from last week, dubiously making the cut at 44.9%. Terminator Salvation made just $16 million in it’s second weekend, for a $91 million total. It’s going to fall far short of it’s $200 million budget. Even though Angels & Demons isn’t exactly taking US audiences by storm, it’s kicking extreme amounts of ass in foreign markets ($105 million US, $252 million foreign).

The turd of the week was Battle for Terra, making $193 this weekend. That’s a 96% drop from last week. It made about $16 per theater per day. Does that even cover the power used to run the projector?